#DumbWaystoDie - Metro Trains Melbourne
- Jerzy Baran
- Nov 3, 2017
- 2 min read
In November 2012 Metro Trains Melbourne started a campaign under a catchy title “Dumb Ways to Die” in which they wanted to promote rail safety. The campaign was mainly focused on children, to remind them to stay safe in a fun and entertaining way, but adults were also involved. Although primarily the message concerned safety around trains, they extended it to cover other things like fire, electricity, wild animals and other risky situations. The idea was to reach as many people as possible, so they created a dedicated website, song, series of videos, accounts on different social media platforms, etc.
They engaged the audience by creating a simple catchy song and animated videos that are about different dumb ways to die which appeals both to children and adults, they also encourage children to learn the song in nurseries and schools. Also, they created a game, both for Android and iOs devices, that shows people different risky situations and behaviours that they have to solve. A lot of people picked up the idea and they started to create their own memes and other artwork (we can see it for example on Pinterest - https://www.pinterest.co.uk/pin/56858014018493659), which helped in reaching to further audience. Furthermore, the hashtag #DumbWaystoDie was widely used in social media by interested people and this helped them to connect, discuss and present their own ideas in this matter. In addition, the company created a series of mascots impressed characters from videos which can be bought through their website. All these actions resulted in a great response from people all around the world.
The campaign managed to link fans by encouraging them to join their cause and create their own content. Thanks to the introduction of the hashtag that was used on all social media platforms to mark every discussion or artwork created both by fans and the company, the audience could easily join the discussion. The game promoted participation in many different ways. Of course, millions of people played it on their device which helped to spread the knowledge, but also different created YouTube videos showing the gameplay to their own fans and this caused further promotion of their campaign. In addition, other companies and schools joined the movement whether by creating their own product inspired by the campaign or by introducing it to pupils in a class.
The campaign is very successful. The dumb ways to die channel on YouTube has over 200 million views and videos made by the audience, for example gameplay videos, have additional millions of views. Two games created by the company were downloaded 200 million times and has over 3 billion unique plays. The song was sold on iTunes 100 thousand times in 28 different countries. The official page on Facebook generated almost 500 thousand likes and almost 500 thousand people are following it.
Statistics sources:
YouTube, games and song: http://www.dumbwaystodie.com/psa/
Example of video made by fan with almost 1 million views: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hffdTsNiJC0
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